


The Stories I Could Tell

by KeeperOfTheEternalFlame



Series: If You Give Me A Minute [1]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24747349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeeperOfTheEternalFlame/pseuds/KeeperOfTheEternalFlame
Summary: An alternate take on the reason behind, "Oops, spoilers!"
Series: If You Give Me A Minute [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1789519
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	The Stories I Could Tell

The first time he says it, it’s decidedly not an accident.

It’s a fun phrase, certainly. Helpful for the persona, absolutely.

But that doesn’t make it entirely true—not the “oops” part of it, anyway.

Okay, maybe he didn’t know for _sure_ that the names Dick and Tim weren’t common knowledge amongst the team, but it was a pretty good gamble that he was speaking a truth that hadn’t yet been aired. Because he knows damn well what a secret identity means here, in this day and age, this time when the world is still only cracked rather than shattered.

How could he not?

He’s come from an era of hellish blue death, blacks and grays, smoke and flame, dust and coals. Every moment of his life has been fueled by a drive to fix the world that’s a little too feverish to be the underpinnings of something so fragile as hope. When he is from, he could not afford to let the details go to waste. There was no stone about the past that he had not stooped to turn over and over, to examine for clues about what might be done when he finally made that journey back. Not a soul alive knows the history of it all better (and the future had better hope that’s true because, otherwise, Bart’s not the best man for the job—which is not the kind of thing anyone wants to consider when it’s too late to replace him).

So, he lists off the names of the young heroes before him one by one as he looks around their little semi-circle.

Garfield gawks and looks confusedly at the Batboys. _“Your name’s Tim?”_ he asks, pointing. Turning to Nightwing, he questions with even more incredulity, _“And yours is…Dick?”_

 _“Oops,”_ Bart follows up with his best attempt at sheepishness. _“Spoilers.”_

The names are a bit of proof for them to chew on, which is great for him and his truthful but outlandish time travel claim, but more than that, it’s also a nice bit of characterization for this formless role he’s got to find a way to breathe life into.

It becomes an integral part of the ruse.

The second time he says it, a few minutes later in the heart of Central City, it is at least somewhat an accident. He blames the slip partially on the intoxicating, invigorating act of inhaling air untouched by the fumes of annihilation, of being able to fill his lungs to capacity, to breathe so deeply he could feel the oxygen feed his very cells. He blames it partially on the sight of buildings and fields, cities and neighborhoods still vibrant and green rather than charred and blanketed by the chill, ashen touch of the Reach Apocalypse.

He blames his foot finding its way into his mouth significantly on the fact that he’s just hugged his grandfather who is _here_ and is _his_ and is still _so very, very alive_.

Also, to be entirely fair, there was no way to know that his grandmother hadn’t actually _told_ his grandpa that he was about to be a father. He knew Grandma Iris was pregnant already, but it was hard to guess much else. On the one hand, maybe if Barry had known about Iris in the broken past that created Bart’s future, he would have called for backup in taking on Neutron so he could stay alive to meet his kids. On the other, maybe Barry had fought all the harder, taken more risks than normal in order to protect his unborn children from a threat that seemed determined to destroy their home.

Bart doesn’t have the capacity to weigh and calculate it, and for once, he doesn’t try to make himself. Not now. Not in this overwhelming moment of reunion. Not with this tangible, technicolor reminder of just how much he has to lose—how much the Earth has to lose—if he gets this wrong.

So he simply leans into this next utterance of, _“Oops, spoilers,”_ as he waves to his grandmother’s belly, the troubled depths of his wide eyes hidden behind the translucent yellow of his goggles.

He loses track of the phrase after a while. It becomes reflexive, in a way.

A month into the endeavor, though, he finally realizes its dual purpose. If he stops to think about it (he hardly ever does—a man stuck in the past can only look to the future, not stay focused on the present), he knows that the phrase is all the fear he can allow himself to show. He’ll never be able to recount the full story of all that he’s left behind (or the nothing he left behind, if you really want to frame it that way). He reasons that the secrecy is definitely for logistical timestream reasons and not emotionally loaded ones. In any case, those two words are the drip of a faucet in the icy winter: they keep him from bursting. He cannot afford to fall into disrepair when there is no one qualified to fix an anomaly like him and no spare part that can replace him. The strain of the system is his and his alone to bear, so he must be his own mechanic.

Once after he says it, he thinks that if they would ask him what was wrong and _mean_ it, he wouldn’t keep a single shred of a secret any longer. He would talk. He would run his mouth at super-speed, so fast not even Grandpa Barry could catch every word. He would slice open his body and spill before them stories of all the scars the Earth would come to bear. Bloody and gruesome they would drip from his throat, his lungs, his stomach. He would offer them the trauma and gladly see them take it in their horror and tears and rage, just so he could finally know the true weight of his own body without accounting for the griefs strapped to his ankles and lashed to his back.

Except maybe he wouldn’t. There’s a good chance he wouldn’t speak at all.

Because there’s a silence, a loneliness, a soldier’s stony countenance Bart carries that he’s come to equate with hardiness and resilience. His speed, passed down through three generations of heroic Allen men, is a legacy, a blessing. But Kryptonians and Amazons be damned, Bart’s real superpower is his strength.

Even if he wanted to tell the whole truth, he is never afforded the chance. Even he, who could turn a minute to an eternity, is only allotted time for this one phrase. So it is his crutch and his saving grace and his Hail Mary and his fury and his quiet weeping.

 _“Oops,”_ he says with the cheeky grin and guilty shrug of this Impulse character that is so fundamentally and necessarily contrary to who he really is. _“Spoilers.”_

They put a hand over his mouth and caution, _“The timestream, dude!”_

And Bart nods. Plays along—all the while praying with the last of the light he tucked away inside himself for safekeeping that there’s not a single spoiler he could know that will hold true.

**Author's Note:**

> Series based on the song "John Wallace" by The East Pointers, which I consider to be Bart "Impulse" Allen's unofficial theme song.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN_QRBdhTZE  
> https://open.spotify.com/track/6EwthEJ6PGI2pRRjpQV16e?si=3OHcQ_-_SkC2Qq7PjOtJVQ


End file.
